Fire

Fire, rapid burning of combustible material with the evolution of heat and usually accompanied by flame. It is one of the human race’s essential tools, control of which helped start it on the path toward civilization.

The original source of fire undoubtedly was lightning, and such fortuitously ignited blazes remained the only source of fire for aeons. For some years Peking man, about 500,000 bce, was believed to be the earliest unquestionable user of fire; evidence uncovered in Kenya in 1981 and in South Africa in 1988, however, suggests that the earliest controlled use of fire by hominids dates from about 1,420,000 years ago. Not until about 7000 bce did Neolithic man acquire reliable fire-making techniques, in the form either of drills, saws, and other friction-producing implements or of flint struck against pyrites. Even then it was more convenient to keep a fire alive permanently than to reignite it.

Original uses of fire

The first human beings to control fire gradually learned its many uses. Not only did they use fire to keep warm and cook their food; they also learned to use it in fire drives in hunting or warfare, to kill insects, to obtain berries, and to clear forests of underbrush so that game could be better seen and hunted. Eventually they learned that the burning of brush produced better grasslands and therefore more game.

With the achievement of agriculture in Neolithic times in the Middle East about 7000 bce, there came a new urgency to clear brush and trees. The first agriculturists made use of fire to clear fields and to produce ash to serve as fertilizer. This practice, called slash-and-burn cultivation, persists in many tropical areas and some temperate zones today.

Manufacture of fire

The step from the control of fire to its manufacture is great and required hundreds of thousands of years. The number and variety of inventions of such manufacture are difficult to imagine. Not until Neolithic times is there evidence that human beings actually knew how to produce fire. Whether a chance spark from striking flint against pyrites or a spark made by friction while drilling a hole in wood gave human beings the idea for producing fire is not known; but flint and pyrites, as well as fire drills, have been recovered from Neolithic sites in Europe.

Most widespread among prehistoric and later primitive peoples is the friction method of producing fire. The simple fire drill, a pointed stick of hard wood twirled between the palms and pressed into a hole on the edge of a stick of softer wood, is almost universal. The fire-plow and the fire saw are variations on the friction method common in Oceania, Australia, and Indonesia. Mechanical fire drills were developed by the Eskimo, ancient Egyptians, Asian peoples, and a few American natives. A fire piston that produced heat and fire by the compression of air in a small tube of bamboo was a complex device invented and used in southeastern Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. About 1800 a metal fire piston was independently invented in Europe. In 1827 the English chemist John Walker invented the friction match containing phosphorous sulfate, essentially the same as that which is in use today.

matchA burning wooden match.iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Fire in religion and philosophy

The sacred fires and fire drills of religious rituals and the numerous fire-gods of world mythology must be interpreted as additional evidence of both the antiquity and the importance of fire in human history. In the ancient Vedic scriptures, Agni, or Fire, is the messenger between the people and their gods and the personification of the sacrificial fire. Brahman households today are supposed to maintain a sacred fire for the worship of Agni, much as the ancient Romans kept a holy perpetual fire cared for by the vestal virgins and as the Greeks tended and transported the sacred fire of Hestia during migrations. The Zoroastrians of Iran placed fire at the centre of their religion and worshiped it as the most subtle and ethereal principle and the most potent and sacred power, thought to have been presented to man directly from heaven and kindled by the Deity himself. Among the Israelites, Abraham might be viewed as a reformer who resisted the ancient worship of Moloch, the god of fire, by child sacrifice. In Siberia both the primitive Koryak and Chuckchi and the more civilized Buryat honoured the fire-god by keeping all filth and impurities away from their fires and hearths. The need to protect fire from contamination was also a belief in parts of Africa, North and South America, and elsewhere. The Aztec of Mexico and the Inca of Peru worshiped gods of fire with sacred flames, which the Inca ignited by concentrating the Sun’s rays with a concave metallic mirror.

The great Greek scientists and philosophers found fire just as significant as did the mystics of religion. Aristotle, for example, declared fire, along with water, earth, and air, to be one of the four general and essential elements of life and of all things. Plato asserted that God used the four elements in the creation of the world. Heraclitus attributed to fire the essential force for creation.

Fire and the growth of civilization

Familiarity with fire, resulting from its easy production by flint and steel, phosphorus matches, or electricity, has led modern civilizations to take fire for granted. Yet, just as the initial control of fire was essential to the development of human beings from Old Stone Age hunters of the tropical forests into the first village-dwelling farmers of the Neolithic, so fire has been essential at every stage of the growth of civilization during the succeeding 10,000 years. From the use of fire to cook food, to clear land, and to furnish warmth and illumination in caves or hovels, fire has been applied to vessels of clay to make pottery and to pieces of ore to obtain copper and tin, to combine these to make bronze (c. 3000 bce), and to obtain iron (c. 1000 bce). Much of the modern history of technology and science might be characterized as a continual increase in the amount of energy available through fire and brought under human control. Most of the increased available energy has come from ever greater amounts and kinds of fires.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kara Rogers, Senior Editor.

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